Page 18 - RusRPTSept19

2.7 15% of Russians left in the middle class
Less than 15% of Russians are considered to be part of the middle class, according to an analysis of official data by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency. 14% of Russia's population is able to afford a mortgage and a car lease and have some cash left over afterward, RIA Novosti said on August 12.
That is down from circa 30% in the boom years. An Alfa bank study recently found the size of the middle class is bigger, but the share of Russians whose wealth places them in the middle class dropped from 37% in 2014 to 30% this year.
Russia's oil- and gas-rich Yamal-Nenets autonomous district has the highest share of the country's middle-class population at 45.2%, according to RIA Novosti's ranking based on official data.
The gold-mining Magadan region ranked second with 34.5%, while the resource-rich Chukotka autonomous district ranked third with 33.8%. The Khanty-Mansiisk autonomous district (32.1%) and the Nenets autonomous district (28.9%) closed out the top five.
Moscow and St. Petersburg placed in seventh and eighth, with 26.8% and 25.7% of its populations considered middle class according to RIA's methodology.
Russian regions in and around the North Caucasus comprised the last six spots on the ranking with an average of 3.45% of their populations able to save a little after their expenses. Overall, Russia's republic of Ingushetia ranked last in the country, with 1.9% of its population considered middle class.
Nationwide, the news agency categorized 14.2% of Russians as middle class.
RIA based its analysis on State Statistics Service (Rosstat) data of households with at least one member employed by a large or medium company over the past year. It classified middle-class households as those with double the minimum wage left over after monthly mortgage and car payments.
2.8 FSB releases labour migrant data for first time in 20yrs
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has for the first time in two decades released data on the number of labour migrants who have arrived so far in 2019, revealing the extent of work-related migration into the country.
Workers from western Europe count in the thousands but those from Central Asia are still in the hundreds of thousands, and almost amn arrived from Uzbekistan alone. Notably despite the de facto war with Russia, 165,000 emigrated from Ukraine to Russia in the first half of this year.
The FSB border service data says a total of 2.4mn migrants have arrived in Russia for work between January and June 2019, according to a tally by the RBC news website.
Data for overall migration in January-June 2019 says that more than 15mn foreigners have crossed the Russian border as tourists, businesspeople, workers, students or for other purposes.
Numbers of labor migrants from countries outside the post-Soviet space were
18 RUSSIA Country Report September 2019 www.intellinews.com